When artificial intelligence takes over the news: how to restore trust in a broken information system

This May, UNESCO World Press Freedom Day and RightsCon are being held together in Zambia, amidst deep concerns about the future of journalism and whether anything resembling a shared digital public space can survive the next decade.

There are many ways in which both of these things could easily disappear. Generative AI is just the latest mechanism to push journalism further away from sustainability, but it could also be the most disruptive yet. Increasingly, AI systems stand between newsrooms and audiences, responding to users directly rather than referring them to original reporting. In the process, they blur distinctions, take content without consent, and blend facts, speculation, and outright falsehoods into responses that are hard to verify and easy to manipulate. For media outlets already struggling to reach audiences and be fairly compensated for their work, this further undermines trust, accountability, and visibility.

At the same time, the story is not simple. For resource-poor newsrooms, especially in low- and middle-income countries, artificial intelligence can be a real boon. It can help editors quickly analyze audience data, translate content into multiple local languages, search large datasets for research, and automate labor-intensive tasks that small teams simply don’t have the capacity to do.

These benefits are important. Media organizations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America are already using AI in pragmatic, often cautious ways, and will continue to do so. Ignoring this reality would mean handing over the future of journalism to actors with far less interest in the public interest or democratic accountability.

But in an asymmetric information ecosystem, where the sustainability of the media is systematically and deliberately undermined by weak policies, extractive technology, and ongoing political attacks, generative and agent-based AI risks eroding the already fragile bonds between journalists and the communities they serve. It is in these relationships that trust lives. When they are severed, journalism loses relevance, and public life loses its shared sense of reality. Creativity, individuality, and nuance are pushed to the margins at the very moment when journalism is becoming more needed, not less.

This is not just a media problem. And that’s before we even get to the question of what this means for democracy, political participation, and international diplomacy. The unchecked spread of disinformation and hate speech generated by artificial intelligence is already eroding political participation and international diplomacy. It is emptying the shared narratives that societies need to confront challenges that know no borders: climate change, conflict, public health. Without reliable information and spaces where people feel heard, democratic decision-making becomes impossible.

Ultimately, we must decide who will control the information infrastructure. It is unrealistic, and probably undesirable, to imagine that technology can be completely removed from public life. But we can and must rethink the role it plays and whose interests it serves.

Some of the solutions to these digital problems may come from the analog age. They lie in rebuilding individual relationships, understanding local needs, and investing time in community trust: slow work that cannot be automated.

The editors of Balobaki Check, a fact-checking website operating in the conflict-ridden eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, realized this early on. Much of the information people relied on came via WhatsApp, often with no way to verify its accuracy. The team initially assumed that sharing reliable news stories in these groups would be enough. It wasn’t. Trust only began to build when journalists spent time talking to people individually, first listening and then earning the right to trust them. This kind of journalism doesn’t scale well and doesn’t fit easily into platform models based on extraction and speed. But that’s exactly what resilient information ecosystems require.

Project Continuum is creating a global movement around this idea: that journalism grounded in human connection, inclusion, and relevance deserves sustained support — from donors, policymakers, and the public. It's about recognizing that technology should strengthen, not weaken, the connections between people and trusted information.

This requires a whole-of-society approach, and media organizations cannot shoulder the burden alone. Policymakers must regulate content licensing, data protection, and competition in ways that do not further entrench platform power. Technology companies must be pressured — and regulated — to be held accountable for the systemic harms their products cause. Donors should invest in the unglamorous, long-term work of maintaining pluralistic, ethical, and safe digital public spaces.

There is also urgent work to be done within the media sector itself. Rather than just passively absorbing every new technological shock that comes its way, journalism must help actively shape the way AI is developed and deployed. This includes supporting newsroom-led AI tools to combat misinformation and disinformation, funding collaborations and grants that promote inclusion, embedding AI literacy in journalism education, and ensuring that media voices are present in the policy debates that will shape the next generation of information infrastructure.

We must invest in environments where many voices can be heard, where people can make informed decisions about their own lives, and where independent journalism remains a civic and humanitarian lifeline.

The future of reporting will include artificial intelligence, but whether it will serve democracy or erode it remains an open question. The answer will lie in the choices we all make: about investment, regulation, collaboration, and, above all, the value we place on journalism that recognizes people not as data points, but as citizens.

Branko Brkić is the leader of the Continuum project.

Meera Selva is the CEO of Internews

Media and organizations that published the article

OpenDemocracy - UK; The New Humanitarian - Switzerland; Poynter - USA; Nieman Lab - USA; Columbia Journalism Review - USA; Tempo - Indonesia; WAN Ifra - Global; Nova Ekonomija - Serbia; Malaysia Kini - Malaysia; N1 - Croatia; Vox Europe - France; Kyiv Independent - Ukraine; Vijesti - Montenegro; Initium - Singapore; Daily Maverick - South Africa; Quint - India; 444 - Hungary